Income Tax Charge & Appeal

I have been hit with an income tax bill from company shares I received as a "gift" from a company I used to work for in 2001. Revenue have valued them at the price I received them at but now they are only worth $500.00 approx and the tax bill is €10,000.00. I have not benefitted by them at all (no divedends etc). Do I have any grounds for appeal?

I don't see how

Maybe you could appeal against interest & penalties

Why didn't you pay the tax back in 2001?

You may be able to crystallise a loss which can be used against any future capital gains

I have been hit with an income tax bill from company shares I received as a "gift" from a company I used to work for in 2001. Revenue have valued them at the price I received them at

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This is standard practice. If you get shares worth x at the time of the gift that is what they are valued at. If the share price went down it's irrelevant. Put another way, say the price of the shares went to 100k in the meantime would you be pleased having to pay 48% tax on it now ?

No but I'd be quite happy to pay the capital gains tax on it. I just feel very hard done by to have to pay €10k that I can't afford on something that essentially was of no benefit to me.
Is there an appeals process with Revenue?

Assuming that the tax charge is correct then why would there be an appeals process

You can appeal if you think the tax charge is incorrectly calculated

You would be better off checking that the actual tax being charged is correctly calculated

Was it an approved share scheme or an approved share scheme

Why was it of no benefit to you?

It was a "gift" from the company when they relaunched as a separate entity. All employees were given 100 shares at the opening price and if you stayed with the company for I think 4 years(the shares soared in value over this period) then you could access the shares. There were 3 options, 1: Sell the shares, 2: Buy the shares at the original opening price or 3: Sell enough shares to be able to purchase the remaining shares at there original price. If you didn't do one of these 3 options then you lost the shares. I choose option 3 as it was a cashless exercise but when I found out that there was a tax liability on it I wrote to the revenue commissioners who advised me that I could defer the tax for 7 years(I paid a lump sum of €1500). I did this in the hope that the shares might increase enough in value to cover the tax liability. The opposite happened and I now have shares worth $500.00 that I have never used and a bill of €10000.

You deferred the tax 7 years ago and took a chance that you could make enough to cover it but you lost the gamble

I don't see how you can appeal then